Warning- check your reels and backing

I posted this on my site and thought it worth sharing as a reminder for people to do their maintenance checks. Granted, my reels see a lot more use than most since they are on a guides boat 5 days a week, but it cant hurt.

I have a few reels in my kit........alright, I have a lot. Maintenance and upkeep are all part of the job. I am religious about washing and spraying my reels after every use as well as regular checks. The one thing thats time consuming is removing the backing.Moisture and salt builds up under the backing over time and is hard to remove.Well, it's backing removal time again and what a shock I got! Some of the reels had some pretty advanced corrosion through the anodising! Now i'm lucky that the manufacturer of one of the reels will stand by their product and replaced the spools, brilliant company. Theres one other reel I need to await "technical tests", but heres what I'm doing now apart from annual backing removal.Ill be fully soaking my spools overnight in salt off or soapy water after each sortie and drying them out, that is, the spools without any bearings etc in the spool itself such as my sages. Before any backing goes on my reels I'm giving the inside of the spools where the backing sits a good coat of carnuba car wax.

The first layer of Braid backing (about the first 20 meters) is getting a solid coat of fish oil, you know, the sticky stuff! The handle and counter balance screws get a coat of grease or protective coating. Ill re-spool and clean each reel annually, as should be done, but more than once a year seems painful so I'm going to use the wax etc to keep em strong meantime.might be worth checking your reels as no reel is immune from this as far as I can tell.